I'd like to reproduce the problem and experiment a bit with it. However, when I installed ipython and the notebook on my ubuntu 12.04 desktop with
sudo apt-get install ipython-notebook
I only got ipython 0.12.1 .
What would I have to do to get ipython 0.13?

This is apparently not only a Mac issue. The same just happened to me on a Windows 7 64bit machine while testing the current beta version of Enthought's new Canopy IDE. It uses an IPython (0.13.1) QTconsole. Typing "import neuron" at the editor's interactive prompt causes a kernel crash. (Typing "import neuron" at a regular Python prompt is fine.) I have tried it with both PyNEURON 7.2.536.7 from the package manager as well as with a manually installed PyNEURON 7.2.536.16. Canopy uses Python 2.7.3.

Thanks for the fix. It works for me with python3 on Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit.

One interesting behavior I noted is that when using neuron from a qtconsole or notebook, the message about neuron that prints when executing 'from neuron import h' does not display in the qtconsole or notebook, but rather in the terminal from which I started the program. Similarly h.psection() returns the value 1.0 in the qtconsole or notebook and the usual text prints in the terminal.

Yes, it is unexpected to me that everything that NEURON prints to stdout goes to the terminal that launched 'ipython notebook'.
I don't have a solution at present. Perhaps there is a way for every run action to temporarily redirect stdout (and stderr) to the socket that expects to receive the print result of that action.

http://www.neuron.yale.edu/hg/neuron/nr ... e3d097b917
takes care of the problem. When python is launched there was no need to augment the path when neuron is imported since it couldn't be imported without already being in the path.
I admit to not understanding why ipython cannot import sys when importing neuron, though.